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Our product is a tracking system created specifically for the
University of Washington Medical Center Specimen Procurement Services
(SPS) division (lab) and its affiliate hospitals or other doctor's
offices (clients).  The product will be used to manage shipments of
lab specimens and other materials between clients and the lab.  It
will be used to track the couriers and specimens while they are on
their routes and dynamically update routes, given to the couriers via
Android-based phones, based on data given to the server.  Hospital
workers and client workers will be able to load the samples into the
system via a web application to begin the tracking process.

This can be useful in the medical field, especifically for the lab,
the client offices, and the health care organizations that the lab
deals with.  The product may be useful for other major medical
services as well if they have similar setups for their off site
clients and need proper tracking of the materials.

This solves an inefficient setup for tracking lab materials.  There
are currently four different major issues with the current system.
The first is that clients currently have no ability to track the
progress of the specimens they send.  They do not know when the
specimen has been delivered or has completed the testing or is in
similar stages.  The product solves this as it allows for clients to
create a record of their specimen in a database that will then follow
the progress of that specimen.  The system will be able to
automatically update portions of the tracking and then the lab
technicians will be able to update its process after they receive it.

The second issue is that the couriers have been told to follow a
designated route and have no information pertaining to the clients
about whether or not they even have anything to pick up.  This results
in a waste of time and money for the couriers as well as stall the,
perhaps time-critical, arrival of the other specimen.  To solve this,
our product will update the couriers with information of which clients
have specimens to pick up and which can be bypassed that day.  If a
specimen becomes available to be shipped after the courier skips the
client, our product will determine the best way to pick up that
specimen.  In the current system, the client would have to wait until
the next time the courier was scheduled to arrive.  Allowing our
system to dynamically change the routes of the couriers will prove to
increase efficiency.

Another issue similar to the couriers not knowing who will have
specimens, is that the labs have no way of judging how many specimens
will arrive with a specific courier.  With our system, each specimen
will be tracked from the time it is picked up, and the lab technicians
will use our system to see how many specimens will arrive in a given
time frame.

Lastly, with the ability to input information about the specimens
directly into the tracking system, the lab technicians will be alerted
to those specimens that have additional information with them.  For
example, if they are irreplaceable, or expire in a certain amount of
time.

The current solutions that are available are closed source systems,
which means they are not easily customizable to adapt to different
systems.  Those systems also tend to be very expensive for what they
are.  One alternative would be using FedEx's SenseAware system.
SenseAware consists of a small computer that is packed with a shipment
that reports where it is and what process it is in.  The issue with
this solution is that it costs money and is not particularly suited
for the management of the couriers, another goal of our system.  Our
product will also be made such that others can take the base and tweak
it to better fit what they need, making it much more malleable than
existing, commercial alternatives.  The system is being built by a
team that is not allowed to accept monetary benefit from the project,
and so no extra costs will be directly involved with implementing the
new system.

Our product will also be specialized for each portion of the system,
so it will allow clients to see what they need, but nothing more than
that, while staff of lab will have more access to the entire system.
It will give instructions to the couriers while they are on their
designated routes, allowing for dynamic and possibly urgent changes
when needed.  Our system is specific to the customer, and so it will
have the ability to be configured more precisely to what is needed.

Some major features we will implement include tracking specimens,
courier instructions, the ability to notify the lab of incoming
specimens, specialized configurations for clients, as well as data
logging. Our system will track a specimen from the time it is added
to the system by clients to be picked up to the time it is scanned at
the final lab destination.  With this tracking ability, if a client is
worried about the progress of their specimen, they will be able to log
into the system and it will display any specimens that their account
allows them to see (see below).  The lab technicians will also be able
to track each specimen that is sent to them.

When the lab technicians log into our system, they will see a list of
incoming specimens as well as an estimation of how many will arrive in
given time slots, say every hour.  This allows the lab to be prepared
to handle a multitude of specimens when a courier arrives by grabbing
extra hands before the estimated time.  It also lets the lab
technicians know if the next hour won't have anything or very little
to process.

Our system includes an Android-based mobile app that the courier
drivers will use.  At the beginning of their shift, the app will have
a checklist for the driver to complete before it will allow them to
see their destinations, much like the process aircraft pilots must go
through before taking-off.  When they arrive at their destinations,
the app will also have checklists configured for each client by
administration for where the specimen will be picked up from and how
to get to them precisely. The driver will be able to scan in the
specimens with the mobile app to check them into the system. The
driver will not be able to work on their next destination until all
directions have been followed for theri current location, including
scanning in each specimen. In between pick-up sites, our app will give
directions to the driver via Google Maps to navigate them to their
next destination. Then the application has similar instructions for
dropping off and for ending a shift that must completed fully in
sequence, making the couriers' jobs very methodical and less
error-prone.

The system will allow administrators from the lab as well as from
clients, that will configure the instructions that are sent to the
couriers.  They will also be able to configure users and abilities for
those users.  For example, they will allow a secretary to add
specimens but disallow them from viewing specimens from other clients
in the system.  Using this log-in process, we will be able to keep a
record of who has done what.  This includes using this to pinpoint
which specimens are handled by which courier.  This will all be stored
for access by the global administrators at the labs.

One feature we would like to add to the system, if we have time, is to
take all the data about specimens in system and format it nicely in
aggregated views so that trends can be seen more easily by lab
personnel.  We will have a graph of ETA times, but in the future, we
would like to have predictive statistics as well.  Another useful
feature is to create an extension to our system that is used
specifically for training new couriers.  This would not log any new
information to our running databases but instead run on mock data to
allow for new couriers to ``learn the ropes'' using the actual system.

Our system will be required to react quickly to input.  For example,
if a client adds a specimen to be picked up while the courier is on
his route, the system will need get that information to the driver's
mobile app as quickly as possible.  With that, our system needs to
seem to be continuously updating information as it gets it.  For
example, it would be useful to auto-refresh the lab technician's
tracking views and the clients progress on their shipped specimens.
It also needs to be able to be running for an extended period of time,
so we cannot allow issues like memory leaks to occur on the mobile app
or on the server.  The database must be able to recover from any
crashes that may happen to it.  If the system crashes, it needs to be
able to be recovered quickly and our data must be safely persistent.

The web application has a user guide for the users to view what they can do, and
each courier will be trained on how to use the Android application.

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